Drak gets pretty much all of the points for team counters. If you're completely flying solo (not recommended for queue length if nothing else) then I'd go with your usual battlescout. Normally I'd go with TT, but in an absolute solo situation vs many gunships, I'd take booster recharge and quads/pods. At that point, harass with quads - even if you don't kill you can disrupt their formation. In TDM, booster will let you gobble DOs. If you're not running from or charging at the gunships, you should probably be looking for those in this scenario. You can try a max burst TT/quads/pods/wingman berseker kind of approach, but it's all or nothing, and you have to have really good aim and hope your target doesn't have awesome reflexes. Honestly, there is no answer to the question of "how can I always kill 3 gunships in a solo ________". If you found an answer to that, that means that gunships would be underpowered. Team play (doesn't have to be VOIP premade, blah, blah, but more complementary ship types) is the real answer.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better if it became focused in the upper tiers on low-end AOE damage, and acquired the lock-on of interdiction missile? Then it could be a cluster/EMP/concussion hybrid. I'd use that. As it is, it's just not worth it when you could ion railgun a minefield.

Hope you stick around. Haven't had that much fun against a pub scout in ages!

I do not feel the least bit bad about this. Gunship and overall domination: Xi'ao - Mangler - Domination - The Shadowlands - 229.34 DPS Xi'ao - Mangler - Domination - The Shadowlands - 135,084 damage

Aha! That was him. I wish it were obvious who people are - I hate getting surprised by people on names I don't recognized I'll add one as well - scout TDM: Xi'ao - Sting - Domination - The Shadowlands - 37 Kills+Assists Updated

I thought weshra was your name... All I need is a "kill ______"

A name! I need a name! Don't keep me hanging here

OOOOOH - who was it?! I like hunting big game.

Drop your mouse sensitivity for GSF. OK, that's out of the way. Experience and skill trump all in GSF. Gear is correlated with both, because while earning the former, you automatically get the latter. The early phases can suck if you go in expecting to be Luke Skywalker, which the rest of the ground game suggests *should* be the case. Early on, you should really concentrate on learning to survive, and to generally figure out how the flow of matches work. Learn how to abandon hopeless satellites and figure out where people *should* be and act accordingly. Figure out when during a dogfight you can best intervene. Figure out how to run and live, rather than stand and die. Learn power-up locations and practice general flying and cooldown usage. There are few things as satisfying as finally getting good in challenging pvp. To use a ground analogy - gsf is a heroic instance with lots of mechanics, but with hidden nameplates. Some enemies are mooks, and you can handle them safely. Many others are silvers and golds. A few are worldbosses. You have to go in and figure out what's what. As you go, you'll get some drops from the mooks (experience, but also gear) that help you against the tougher enemies. Expect to medprobe a lot until you figure it out. I would suggest joining the gsf chat channels, whispering top pilots after games to get advice, and to start grouping with good pilots you meet in matches. You'll get faster queue pops as a group, and you can build core teams that add to the social side of the game and give you reliable teammates.

No, Drak was talking about your approach being good (which I agree with), and I was talking about you letting some damaged targets go unnecessarily easily.

Since the patch has reverted GSF to pre 3.0, I will now begin to update the thread again. If anyone can beat the current records, that is . Also, I've looked over the records again, and I am not going to be updating the "Medals" category for anything below 18 medals for the general category. 17+ medal counts seem to be happening too frequently to keep a reasonably short list. If there are open spots in the ship records, I will fill those, and will continue to count ties at 18 medals until it gets ridiculously long - then I'll flush the 18 medal records and we'll have 19+ medal counts go into that list.

I think we're saying the same thing. Heavy missiles do not contribute burst in a *sufficiently reliable* way to take them into account as true burst damage. Once again, I think it comes back to problems with the battlescout. The thing has access to so many nice things that it makes it really difficult to balance by doing minor tweaks. Nerf dfield? gunships get hit so much harder than battlescout, because battlescouts have cluster (this is really freaking important - gunships and battlescouts must be in equilibrium or the meta goes to ****). Nerf cluster? T1 and T2 strikes get shafted, but battlescout just goes pods. Nerf pods? T1 scout loses out a lot more. Nerf both? Well, missiles exit the meta completely, and battlescouts still have the best primaries/systems combination for most scenarios. All this makes me think that we do need to add something special to strikes, potentially as a single component systems slot. T1 strikes could certainly do to get access rocket pods. I definitely like making ion cannon a 5km+ weapon. For T2, we could also shift the heavy missile meta by largely removing reload times and increasing the cooldown on cluster, so second break will still work well against cluster (so gunships can defend against battlescouts) but cannot remove the pressure of continuous long-lock by dangerous things like proton. I don't make this suggestion lightly, because I absolutely detest that annoying beep beep beep noise. Strikes gain more pressure on gunships, and battlescouts get a slight nerf to their damage (this should be done in combination with an offensive cooldown balance pass). I also cannot stress enough that making heavy missiles better will NOT make strikes top tier ships unless it's done in such an extreme way that it borks the meta the other way completely - the changes need to be deeper than that.

I think it's very questionable to call missile secondaries that aren't cluster "burst damage" for strikes, at least in the sense where it is tactically relevant in gsf. I mean even with no dfield break, lock-on tone warning and time of flight of the missile itself means that a target is always going to either have a chance to fly out of the locktone, buy time to break the lockon with engine cd, or regain some defenses (quick charge, repairs, etc) taken out by blasters before the missile lands. Basically if it's not point blank cluster, you can't control whether the missile damage lands with primary weapon damage as a controllable "burst". T1 strikes absolutely burst harder and more reliably with ion cannon followed by quads that anything it can do with missiles. Also given the reload, lockon time, and difficulty of landing proton/thermite, a properly flown T3 I think should definitely be deriving most of its damage from using blasters. Otherwise is to imply that it's doing very little damage, period, since proton/thermite don't really have enough effective uptime given how hard they are to use. Speaking of strike burst, here's an idea - have strikes get access to a systems slot, 3 tiers. One tier boosts health and DR, and one gives a slight boost to engine efficiency. Third tier choice has passive a missile lockon and reload time reduction on one side for T2, and the, other side allows firing both primary and secondary weapons together (though you'd need to rework the control scheme to make this a toggle-able option - maybe hold down the swap weapon key?).

Fixed that for you . Words to live by.

Major source of strike damage? Only for T2. I'm pretty sure most of my T1 and T3 damage come from primary weapons, not missiles. In any event, we are now back to pre 3.0. Looks like fixes are going through tomorrow: http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes/12162014/game-update-3.0.1-patch-notes

Thanks for organizing this. Was a blast, even if you were a big meanie to my gunship!

So don't bother posting unless we completely agree with you? This will be an excellent thread.

No, it wasn't directed at you specifically, just in general, since I wanted to make sure the issues were separated. And yes, engine cd tweaking was largely directed at barrel roll (and power dive) in the context of dfield losing break. I think barrel roll should be buffed (and *especially* if dfield loses missile break), and I'd prefer the buff to be in the form of keeping the increased post nerf energy cost but with the cd dropped to 15s. That way it would be more expensive than koiogran/retro but have the same cd. Also, I do agree that power dive is a little bit too powerful - it should be lower cd than the others to compensate for the usage difficulty, but perhaps not 10s vs 15s.

See http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=779300 Many of the T4/T5 talents are currently broken. The hope is that the next fix patch will correct these issues.

Seen it a few times. Yes, it's due to someone dropping out (or never loading into a match) and the matchmaker being unable to fill the slot before the imbalance timer ends the match prematurely. And when that's in the offing, I'll specifically roll a gunship and call for tensor to bag someone before it ends in a loss...

I think it's also sort of off the mark to say that the dfield missile break feature (and missiles in general) is determinative of strikes' place in the meta. The current bugs makes the T2, and only the T2, significantly better. The problem with getting strikes to be top-tier at high levels of play goes way beyond just the missile meta. It's telling that T3 bombers and gunships play a much better "strike" (multirole) game than actual strikes, for the most part, because of the advantage of their secondaries and systems.

Having played numerous games since the patch broke everything, in my mainstays (T1 GS, T2 scout), as well as T2 strike to test the effects on missile use, I have a few comments about it all. 1) The world did not end with loss of second missile break. Well, this wasn't at all surprising, but it bears mentioning. Leads into ... 2) Dfield losing missile break actually has not dramatically changed the flow of play for most ships. Now of course it's all in the context of much additional broken-ness - quite possibly a lot can change when ships get access to refills and protons/thermites get access to their speed boost options again, and there are more seekers out there. 3) T2 strikes are finally OK. Not OP, or even top-flight, but just OK. That tells you just how broken the strike situation was before. People losing their second missile break was critical for this. 4) That said, dfield permanently losing missile break should only happen in the context of other changes: gunships need improved missile defense options, either a buffed BR or access to power dive. Now, why do this when I say that the loss of missile break hasn't changed things much? Because I have 3k matches played and adapted quickly. Most veterans will, but most new players do not have the experience to deal with a much more missile-heavy environment. Cluster is the most dangerous thing to gunships. This might seem like a crazy view, but hear me out. Quads/LC and pods may allow for cheap kills against bad (most) gunships, but look at gunship/scout play at the highest levels. I never die to opening scout burst - well, so infrequently that it's basically never. Quads-n'Pod me all you like, but unless I'm really distracted, really damaged, a scout has DO AND cooldowns or the approach is gosh darn perfect, a scout won't kill me on its first pass. I *will* die to a scout pilot of equivalent skill, but it's attritional, not because of opening burst. Cluster attrition is also a much surer way of killing even bad gunships, if a scouts opening burst can't cheese the encounter. In that context, cluster is far more dangerous in most encounters than rockets. The balance pre 3.0 was pretty good between scouts and gunships (I say this as both a GS and battlescout pilot). If dfield changes post 3.0 are going to be real, something else needs to change to keep things just as balanced. 5) Dfield missile break needs to have a viable replacement. We could grant a passive evasion boost equivalent to on-CD use of the active with increased duration, but that might just reintroduce too much evasion into the meta. Passively increasing missile lock time (as I believe Verain suggested once) would be nice. 6) I totally agree about buffing BR even in isolation from DField. I always thought they over-nerfed it for all classes.

Very nice video. Excellent music. I agree with what has been said already. I'll add a few comments about the play. I feel like you broke off too early in some of your engagements. For example, against the Mangler at ~0:52, you should have turned and pressed him till he was dead or safely well away from contesting the node. He didn't have a peel available, and by breaking off when you did you gave him the chance to shoot you as you re-entered the scrum at A. This would have been extremely ill-advised if the target were a more dangerous gunship pilot. It's arguable whether you should have immediately pressed your advantage on the minelayer (Skirne) at the very beginning. Minelayers are much easier to dislodge on approach, and I think you should have risked the mine when you were at full health for a chance to take him out early, with pre-emptive dfield use to counter the gunship charging on you. As it was, the minelayer was alive to contest (and win) the node later on. A life spent early is often worth it for a small bit of early advantage in domination. As it was, it didn't matter in this match, but still.

This may be one of my best

What about beep beep? The lack of missile break has turned many matches into huge shooting galleries of people that can't deal with missiles...